The Bones Are There

Zigzagging across the globe, Kate Sutherland’s fourth book is poetry by way of collage: pieced-together excerpts from travellers’ journals, ships’ logs, textbooks and manuals, individual testimony, even fairy and folk tales that tell stories of extinction—of various species, and of our own understanding of, and culpability within, its process. Across its three sections, Sutherland draws identifiable connections between various animal extinctions and human legacies of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and misogyny, charting the ways in which they juxtapose one another while impacting the natural order of things.

As much as it is a critique of humanity’s disastrous effects on this world, The Bones Are There is also a celebration of such incredible creatures, all sadly lost to us. It honours their memory by demanding accountability and encouraging resistance, so that we might stave off future irrevocable loss and preserve what wonders that remain.

AUTHOR

Kate Sutherland

KATE SUTHERLAND was born in Scotland, immigrated to Canada as a child, and grew up in Saskatoon. She studied first at the University of Saskatchewan, then at Harvard Law School. Her short story collection, Summer Reading, won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Best First Book. She is the author of The Bones Are There and How to Draw a Rhinoceros, which was shortlisted for a Creative Writing Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. She lives in Toronto where she is a professor and conducts research in the fields of Tort Law, Feminist Legal Theory, and Law and Literature at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University.

Reviews

“[Sutherland] utilizes the archive; not as an end, but as a way in which to examine, articulate and critique. Sutherland writes the ways in which others, from animals to people, particularly women, are victimized through the conquest of capitalism, colonialism and conquest.” —rob mclennan

“The Bones Are There breathes life into the dead. Sutherland reimagines our world as if our ancestors had been less careless and bloodthirsty, less intent on their own aggrandizement. It’s a world you need to see.” —Portal Magazine

“Expertly crafting scientific and first-hand source material, [Sutherland] calls into clear view the myth making nature of historical “fact” and the efficacy of conservation science when serving a colonial philosophy.” —Arc Poetry Magazine